“Them books along with the bookcase is from the woman who takes Room Number Four,” Binah had told Essie one day while they were giving the parlor its weekly cleaning. “Had them shipped after one of her times passing through.”
The parlor furniture was a gift from the woman too.
“After a different time,” said Binah.
Room #4 was on the third floor of the east wing. It was a modest-sized room with waltz-out windows onto a balcony that overlooked a small courtyard dotted with potted palms and ferns. Creamy pink bougainvillea traipsed along the back gate.
“Parlor furniture Miss Abby had before was plenty nice but nowhere near as fancy,” Binah had added as Essie polished the top of the center table and Binah its pedestal and paw feet.
Binah, a bit older than Essie, was the gentlest soul she had ever met. Essie envied how she slept like the dead. Once her head hit the pillow Binah was out. No tossing and turning. No sleepless nights like Essie sometimes suffered.
“Let it be one you say is called a fairy tale,” Binah often pleaded nights the girls weren’t bone tired. Essie happily picked up the well-worn copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, a book she’d bought at Miss Tansy’s Odds-and-Ends Shop expressly for Binah, who often asked Essie to read the same story three nights in a row.
Essie always obliged, hoping it would spur Binah to want to learn to read. Within weeks of moving into Miss Abby’s Essie had come to cherish Binah no matter that she was limited in conversation and prone to say strange things, was more like eight than eighteen. At least Essie had a friend. A sense of purpose too. There was so much that she could teach Binah, who had a peace about her Essie wished she had.
“Was left on Miss Abby’s veranda in a sweetgrass basket, they say,” Binah had casually told Essie. “Spose it was for the best.” Sweet-tea-brown Binah, slack jawed and blind as a bat without her spectacles, had not a whit of curiosity about her ma or her pa. Neither did she mourn being born with a right arm a bit twisted and shorter than the left. “Makes me mighty grateful my each legs the same size,” she said on one of the days the girls were out back with a bucket of steamed crabs. No, nothing much bothered Binah. She took everything in stride. Never took offense or got riled, not even when someone was cruel to her as happened one day when Cook sent them marketing.
Essie had been at Miss Abby’s for just about a year on that bright May day when the girls walked arm in arm to the Market House. It teemed as ever with fruit peddlers, vegetable peddlers, butchers, fishmongers, women selling candy, selling flowers, vendors of every sort.
Binah was mesmerized by the great pile of corn in Miss Prichard’s tiny stall, aiming to select ears with the most silk, Essie knew. Binah seemed to have her mind just about made up when a blowsy, snaggletoothed white woman yelled at her.
“Nigra, you is taking too long!” The woman shoved Binah aside so hard that she tumbled to the ground.
“I sorry,” Binah responded to the woman, who never even glanced her way, just commenced dropping ear after ear of corn into her basket.
Just then a gang of white rowdies barreled through the crowd out to steal food and pickpocket like always. In the distance dogs sent up yelps and yaps.
Blood boiling, Essie helped Binah to her feet. “We can come back for the corn. Let’s go get the squash.”
The girls hadn’t taken three steps when another commotion kicked up.
“What I done!? What I done!?” shouted a man, voice full of fear.
As she and Binah drew near, Essie saw that the frightened man was Primus Grady. Officer Riley McDermott, a churlish ox of a man chewing tobacco, was giving the old man a drubbing about the neck and head. Then he grabbed him by the arm.
“What I done!?” Primus Grady cried out again.
“I tole you, nigra, you can’t be peddlin’ chickens here without no license.” The policeman released his grip, picked up the cage of chickens beside the old man’s feet. The three scrawny bantams started squawking and running in circles.
Poor thing, thought Essie as she looked at the old man, bent and gaunt with a scraggly beard. Dirty homespun shirt kept closed with rusted safety pins. His patched pants, held up with a piece of cord, didn’t even reach to his ankles. His run-down shoes lacked laces.
Cage in hand, Officer McDermott grabbed the old man’s arm again. “You just earned yourself a twenty-dollar fine!”
“Sir,” said Essie, pushing through the crowd. “Please, sir, Mister Grady, he’s all he’s got, barely scrapes by. Ain’t no way he can pay a big fine.”
Officer McDermott was red-faced. “You shut up!”
“Sir, I’m just—”
The policeman knocked Essie’s market basket out of her hands, shoved the cage of chickens at her, then snatched her up by the arm.
“Need help?” It was another policeman, Matthew Buckley, a man Essie used to call Uncle Matt.
Immediately Essie looked down at the ground.
“I got things under control,” said the ox chewing tobacco.
“What’s the charges?”
“This ole good-for-nothing ain’t got no license. And this nigra wench was mouthin’ off. Gonna charge her with disturbin’ the peace.”
Officer Buckley treated Essie to a wink and a roguish smile. “Riley, I know this gal. You can let her go.”
Officer McDermott spat, released his grip on Essie. “If you say so, Matt, but if you ask me she need a good hidin’.”
Avoiding Buckley’s eyes, Essie grabbed her basket from the ground, hurried through the crowd and back to Binah.
Nearby stood Sarah Pace’s prim and proper mother, Florence, with her sister, Drusilla. Both women were shaking their heads, looking prideful and disgusted.
Essie looked away.
“What a disgrace that Primus Grady is!” one snapped.
“Trash. Absolute trash!” said the other. And Essie could feel their eyes on her.
“Over three puny chickens,” Essie muttered as she and Binah walked on. “You know what’ll happen to Mister Grady if he can’t pay that fine?”
“Policeman keep his chickens?”
The girls were nearing the Sheftall butcher’s stall.
“They’ll keep his chickens for sure. Also likely to make him work the fine off … Farm him out to some planter or put him on a chain gang doing road or railroad work.” Essie had read of a colored woman who got ten years in the penitentiary for snatching five dollars from a white child’s hand. “What white child goes about with five dollars?” Essie had scoffed after she read the item.
The girls were past Sheftall’s stall, past a white graybeard peddling peacocks, past clusters of crates and barrels, when Essie sighed. “Will it ever end?”
“End? You mean the world?” asked Binah. She lit up. “Midwife Keziah say there be a book in the Bible that say the world will end one day. Yes, it will.” Binah stopped, broke out into a broad smile. “Same book say there will be a new heaven and a new earth.”
“I meant whitefolks ways, Binah. Like how that woman shoved you. How Officer McDermott troubled Primus Grady. You think he ever ask a white peddler if he has a license?”
Essie was steaming over other recent outrages. That white boy on Bull Street who shot a black boy in the leg for sassing him. She was also still galled over the Johnson C. Whittaker incident.
“At six o’clock yesterday,” the Savannah Morning News had reported, “Johnson C. Whittaker, the colored cadet at West Point, was found in his room bound hand and foot, in a half-unconscious condition, and with a piece of one ear cut off.”2 The paper later reported that the authorities believed Whittaker had mutilated himself, then made things look like he had been attacked.
“Even when we try to serve the nation …,” Essie mumbled. “Things going from bad to worse.”
For the first time in a long time Essie thought about leaving Forest City. She had read about hundreds, thousands of Southern colored folks pulling up stakes, people called Exodusters, people seeking to get as far away as possible from places where colored were lynched, burned at the stake, beheaded, whipped, where colored women were constantly outraged, where whitefolks strutted around declaring, “This is a white man’s country!”
“And all these doggone Confederate monuments they’ve been putting up,” Essie muttered. Augusta. Thomasville. Macon. Quitman. Columbus. The Savannah Morning News celebrated the laying of cornerstones and unveilings of monuments outside of Georgia too. Essie had made a point to steer clear of Forsyth Park on the day the city replaced the statues of Justice and Silence atop its Confederate monument with a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier. As then so now Essie wished every one of the monuments struck by lightning as happened to the one in Lynchburg a few years back.
Essie had read that Kansas was the promised land for loads of Exodusters. Kansas, where land could be had for just a few dollars and where colored were free to build their own towns. Nicodemus was the first such town that came to mind on that bright May day at the Market House. Essie wondered what it would be like to live on the prairie, dwell in a sod house. Come winter could she bear up under the cold?
“End times!” Binah blurted out just as Essie ceased woolgathering about being an Exoduster. “That’s what Midwife Keziah always say. End times!”
“Maybe she’s right,” said Essie, mind on how much ground colored had lost. “You know, Binah, there was a time, back after slavery days, we had colored men on the city council, also in the state legislature. Was a time we had about a dozen colored man in the US Congress. One was from Georgia. Jefferson Long … Now I think we don’t have but one, Senator Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi.”
“What did those colored men do?”
“Make laws, run things … You know here in Savannah we had our own colored fire companies, but they broke them up a few years back.”
Binah frowned. “Where’s the harm in colored men putting out a fire?”
Essie shook her head. “Whitefolks want all the power.”
“What make them like that?”
Essie shrugged.
“Think when come the new heaven and the new earth whitefolks will learn to share?”
“I don’t know, Binah,” Essie replied. “I just don’t know. It’s passing strange.”